Latest articles
by Ellen Brown / October 3rd, 2017
The policy of guaranteeing every citizen a universal basic income is gaining support around the world, as automation increasingly makes jobs obsolete. But can it be funded without raising taxes or triggering hyperinflation? In a panel I was on at the NexusEarth cryptocurrency conference in Aspen September 21st-23rd, most participants said no. This is my rebuttal.
In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world’s best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 …
by Peter Koenig / October 3rd, 2017
Yesterday’s historic vote – the Referendum decided by the Government of Cataluña, called illegal by the neoliberal Rajoy Government of Madrid – turned into an event of abject police violence against masses of unarmed voters. The Referendum may have been illicit according to the Spanish Constitution, but voting in a referendum as an expression of opinion is a human right, regardless of whether the central government of Madrid would, or would not, accept the result of the vote.
In the early Monday morning hours, the Catalan Government issued statements saying that about 2.3 million Catalans, 42.3% out 5.3 million eligible voters, …
by Adnan Al-Daini / October 3rd, 2017
The ferocious beast of the so called free-market capitalism needs to be on a leash before it devours all around it, including our planet. Britain’s Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn has now emphatically signalled that they will do just that. Actually, free-market is a misnomer; a more accurate name would be crony capitalism, where corporate profits are privatised and losses are socialised.
The country now has a choice between two distinct visions. On the one side we have free-market economics espoused by the Tories where the market is king and can do no wrong. On the other we have Labour …
by John R. Hall / October 2nd, 2017
Spinning through time and space on a tiny blue sphere, somewhere in an infinite universe. Well into my 70th revolution around the burning star which sustains us. Growing ever-closer to imminent demise, but searching…still searching…ever searching for an infinitesimal shred of understanding. Just a worker bee, blown off course by a hurricane of conflicting information. Separated and alienated from my Hive long ago.
Somewhere deep within the Hive, and hidden from their underlings, the Banking Queen and her Wall Street/Government Drones disseminate electronic misinformation, manipulate the masses, and scheme to control or conquer neighboring colonies. ‘Tis the Hive of Empire. The exceptional Hive. The all-powerful one. …
The rival Palestinian factions are set to meet in Gaza after a decade of bitter feuding
by Jonathan Cook / October 2nd, 2017
Hamas’s offer to submit to a long-delayed reconciliation process with its Fatah rivals signals that the balance of regional forces may be tipping in its favour and against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, analysts say.
Officials from the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, are due in Gaza on Monday, for the first time in three years, to test Hamas’s commitment to establishing a unity government.
The first weekly government meeting is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, with an Egyptian delegation overseeing the proceedings.
Hopes are that reconciliation will end a decade of bitter feuding between Hamas and Fatah – …
by Robert Hunziker / October 2nd, 2017
The Great Acceleration, post WWII humanity forcing the earth system, is charging ahead at exponential speed, including record temps year-after-year-after year-after year and on and on it goes, relentlessly.
Fatally, many parts of the world become uninhabitable with a 2°-4°C increase in temps, too hot for human physiology. Under the circumstances, the human body cannot get rid of bodily heat fast enough. People die. Will worldwide average temps increase by 2°-4° and if so, how fast? Nobody knows for sure, but the outlook is lousy.
We need to understand that we are in a nonlinear exponential phase… we have overwhelming scientific evidence …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 2nd, 2017
Cuba has, for decades, been a form of political pathology for US political consciousness. Fidel Castro loomed in his indestructible guise, tormenting a succession of American presidents with his seeming indestructibility. Efforts at deposing and assassination had conspicuously failed. It was left, then, to Washington to insulate, seal off and keep Cuba as an infectious patient of international relations, fearing its global reach and influence.
With the softening of this manic stance under the Obama administration, Cuba ceased being the incurable. It even had promise. US business officials were smacking their lips and rubbing hands. The new Cuba might well return …
Submission to United Nations Human Rights Commission, Geneva, Switzerland
by Ike Nahem / October 2nd, 2017
This document was submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Office of the Commissioner, based in Geneva, Switzerland in the name of Cuba solidarity organizations in the New York-New Jersey area of the United States. These are the political views and analysis of the author.
*****
The first members of a team of 165 Cuban doctors and health workers unload boxes of medicines and medical material from a plane upon their arrival at Freetown’s airport to help the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone, on October …
by Jonathan Cook / October 1st, 2017
Alternet has gone public with concerns about the way Google and Facebook have limited traffic to its website and, more generally, undermined access to progressive and independent media.
Its traffic from web searches has dropped precipitously – by 40 per cent – since Google introduced new algorithms in the summer. Other big progressive sites have reported similar, or worse, falls. More anecdotally, and less significantly, I have noticed on both my own website and Facebook page a sharp drop in views and shares in recent weeks.
Alternet is appealing for financial help, justifiably afraid that the drop …
by David Penner / October 1st, 2017
Amazing Things are Happening Here.
— Motto of Weill Cornell and New York-Presbyterian
Countless times as a patient both at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Weill Cornell in New York City, I have witnessed doctors arrogantly waltzing into an examination room and arriving not alone, but with an entourage. Like Greeks bearing gifts, they arrived with something unwanted and threatening: medical students, interns, residents, and fellows. And not once, in all the many times that I have been subjected to this ignominious practice, was my consent ever obtained prior to the doctor’s arrival.
As there are experienced and inexperienced doctors, there also experienced and inexperienced …
by Yves Engler / October 1st, 2017
Shouldn’t leaders who claim to support the interests of the poor and working class inside Canada also take left wing positions internationally?
Yet when a leadership candidate for a left wing party embraces a politician who has repeatedly taken pro-imperialist international stances it hardly creates a stir. Reflecting an indifference to the injustices the Canadian government commits abroad, Jagmeet Singh’s alignment with Hélène Laverdière has been all but ignored.
Since the NDP foreign critic endorsed Singh to be leader of the party he has repeatedly cited the former Canadian diplomat’s support. Singh’s campaigned with Laverdière, sent out an email appeal from the …
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / October 1st, 2017
The tragedy of Puerto Rico is that it assumed – incorrectly – that it would be protected and prosperous as an American colony because America is so rich and powerful, and that from there it could eventually become the 51st American state, thus gaining a voice and votes in the American Congress, which determines how the benefits of American wealth and power are distributed.
What Puerto Rico failed to realize is that both individuals and nations that are rich and powerful did not become that way by being generous and inclusive.
Puerto Rico assumed there were only three modes of existence it …
Lifespans shrinking, social safety nets fraying, communities siloing, leaders murdering
by Paul Haeder / September 30th, 2017
All it takes for a society to express fear, paranoia, confusion, and a sort of mad country (riffing on mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) mental disease is a toxic brew of narcissism, propaganda, amnesia, planned and perceived obsolescence and a transnational economic barbarism against the collective masses, and we end up here:
Leaders (sic) in USA, Canada, Mexico, most of Latin America, most of Europe, Australia, Japan, Israel and Middle East are as nasty and ethically/morally arrested developed as any of the lots in power-on thrones-in war rooms at anytime during the development (sic) of “civilization,” so much so that’s …
by Alex Anfruns / September 30th, 2017
The recent years of economic crisis in Spain have had two major consequences in the political landscape: the arrival of progressive political movements and the collapse of the two-party system. At the same time, a sovereignty movement, with the ability to mobilise large sectors of society, has emerged in Catalonia. As the referendum approaches, the central government has multiplied its efforts to stop it from taking place, raising again the spectre of franquismo in the collective memory. This has been met with widespread opposition and paradoxically a growing wave …
by James O'Neill / September 30th, 2017
Prior to his election as President of the United States Donald Trump had been highly critical of the agreement reached between China, France, Germany, Russia, the US, the UK and Iran and the European Union aimed at preventing Iran from enriching uranium to the point where is could manufacture nuclear weapons. He repeatedly referred to the agreement as “a horrible agreement”, the “stupidest deal of all time” and “the worst deal ever.”
At his now notorious address to the United Nations General Assembly in September he extended his attack to Iran itself, calling it a “corrupt dictatorship” and a nation “on …
Big Money Makes Strange Bedfellows
by Samayia Taylor / September 29th, 2017
University of New Haven and Saudi Police: Big Money Makes Strange Bedfellows
In America, college students are just arriving on their campuses- some for the first time- ready to start the new academic year. They have a wide range of interests and goals, from bringing about the latest medical breakthrough to wanting to change U.S. foreign policy. Some may even want to become President. One thing they all have in common though, is that they have just entered a time in their lives where they will …
by Randy Shields / September 29th, 2017
95 million Americans are out of the workforce, millions are losing their wholly inadequate Obamacare, half can’t afford a $400 emergency and the Satanic minions in Washington DC just approved $729 million more to move the rubble around in Afghanistan. Trump ups the obscene military budget by $56 billion but the righteous US Congress rebels — and increases it to $80 billion. The American monster is hungry, angry, restless for its war fix — what people will it destroy next: Iranians, North Koreans, Venezuelans? There’s no relief anywhere from the madness of America.
It’s a semi-Great Depression and I’m …
by Graham Peebles / September 29th, 2017
The pressures of modern life are colossal; for young people — those under 25 years of age — they are perhaps greater than at any other time. Competition in virtually every aspect of contemporary life, a culture obsessed with image and material success, and the ever-increasing cost of living are creating a cocktail of anxiety and self-doubt that drives some people to take their own lives and many more to self-abuse of one kind or another.
Amongst this age group today, suicide constitutes the second highest cause of death after road/traffic accidents, and is the most common cause of death in …
Book Review: Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism
by Elias Davidsson / September 29th, 2017
The author, Bruce Hoffman, was for a long time a director at RAND Corporation in Washington, which he designates in his book as an “independent, objective, nonpartisan research institution” (p. xi).
As an external observer, researcher and author, I have followed with keen interest for many years the debate surrounding the phenomenon of terrorism: its definition, rationale, execution, effects and legal aspects.
I came initially across Hoffman’s book when I examined the activities of Germany’s Federal Center for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, or BpB), which is not, as its name might suggest, a university institute or a department in the Ministry of Education, …
by Robert Hunziker / September 29th, 2017
The Trump administration has a nasty habit of issuing “sentences before verdicts,” which is eerily similar to the “off with your head” mentality of the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Off with your head is the Trump/Pruitt/Zinke overriding approach to science, thus leaving America’s best and brightest in a vortex of perpetual bewilderment.
Unfortunately, in addition to bullying scientists, Trump’s henchmen ignore science but approve risks of toxicity to America’s golfers! Here’s what’s happened: It’s all about chlorpyrifos, originally designed as a wartime nerve agent by the Nazis, which is sprayed on golf courses as a pesticide and …
by Gary Corseri / September 29th, 2017
The soundtrack to daily life is a very specific tone of voice that is heard across all news outlets and entertainment channels. The voice of the generic talking head as he or she mouth platitudes and empty repetitive cliches….
— John Steppling
I wish it were not so, but it was, and is, so,…and so it goes….
It is difficult to say when precisely the phenomenon commenced, but because it was first recorded at a Commencement Ceremony at a very small and unimportant “Liberal Arts” college in the embarrassing “fly-over” part of the country, and somewhat deftly reported by a …
Book Review: Why Don't The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing The Twenty-First Century Resistance. (Editors: Truscello, M., And Nangwaya, A.)
by Lloyd McCarthy / September 29th, 2017
When academics and activists, drawn from differing ideological persuasions and dissimilar social milieu, from around the world collaborate in the compilation of a book on the topical issue of social uprising in a time of relative calm, it begs the question, what is the state of the social order? Is it less desirable than its opposite? The question, “Why don’t the poor rise up?” is addressed by twenty (20) academics, labor organizers, and community activists in a book of the same title, Why Don’t The Poor Rise Up?: Organizing The Twenty-First Century Resistance.
…
by Binoy Kampmark / September 28th, 2017
Unauthorized disclosures of classified information have become a cancer which undermines presidential authority to conduct foreign policy, our national security process, and our intelligence capabilities.
— William J. Casey, Director of the CIA, Nov 14, 1986
It’s the perfect dream in a nightmarish context: how do intelligence services get around the problem, in a liberal democracy, of punishing outlets that reveal classified information? The issue, when it reaches the stiff, paranoid official in a home ministry (domestically sounding, if British; more stately, if American) drives the establishment to distraction.
Laws, having being put in place to supposedly protect and encourage the dissemination of …
A report from the refugee camps of Lebanon
by Heather Stroud / September 28th, 2017
It is hard to reconcile how a government that sold out the civilian population of Palestine can celebrate the shameful letter Lord Balfour sent to Lord Rothschild. Although termed in language that presented itself as only offering a homeland to the Jewish people, with no discrimination to be brought against the indigenous Palestinian population, it is evident the agreement was always intended as a precursor to the establishment of Jewish Statehood in Palestine. It is documented that Lord Balfour stated that he had no intention of consulting the Palestinians when he effectively gave their homeland away. This initial …
by John W. Whitehead / September 28th, 2017
by Jonathan Cook / September 28th, 2017
The state-corporate media must be in trouble if a BBC veteran like Nick Robinson is getting dirty in the trenches, taking up arms against the “guerilla war” he claims people like me are waging. In a new commentary piece for the Guardian, he argues that media critics – from the right and the left – are taking to social media in an organised campaign to discredit what Robinson calls the “mainstream media”. Predictably, his article strikes the self-satisfied tone of those who claim to be right because they have come under attack from both sides.
Let me delay …
by John Steppling / September 28th, 2017
I don’t live in the U.S. any longer. I did, for over forty years, but left for good almost twenty years ago. But I return, often, and I even returned and stayed for a year. I returned again this last week as an invitee of the Buffalo/Niagara Falls Film Festival (more on that below).
So, I wanted to talk about the America I found this time through. I changed planes in Washington D.C., at Dulles Airport (yes, named after cold war reactionary John Foster Dulles). I could not but think of that fascist loving arch elitist and racist as I sat …
by Anna Jaunger / September 28th, 2017
Recently, mass media is actively emerging new evidence of cooperation between the U.S. and ISIS terrorists.
This time, Warfare Worldwide organization tweeted a video, where an ISIS fighter from Deir Ezzor had told some shocking details about U.S.-ISIS collusion.
According to Mohammed Moussa al-Shawwakh, the U.S. and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) guaranteed to protect them from the SAA and its allies in exchange for entering gas and oil fields in the region in order to make propaganda videos. Al-Shawwakh said that such kind of cooperation had acted in the Conoco gas field, allegedly captured by the SDF. The fighter added that according …
by Manuel Garcia Jr. / September 27th, 2017
The island of Puerto Rico has been destroyed by Hurricane Maria and remains in ruins with little outside assistance for about a week now. What should be done?
The U.S. could (if it wanted to) send an aircraft carrier (or two or three) to Puerto Rico, and use its nuclear reactor as a power source for basic needs in San Juan (where it would most likely dock). It could offload mobile hospital units (MASH) and truck and/or helicopter such units to more remote locations; such units would include gasoline/diesel generators. Additionally, there are Marine units designed to set up helicopter landing …
He must go
by Stuart Littlewood / September 27th, 2017
I’ve been writing about the plight of the amiable Palestinian people under Israel’s jackboot for the same length of time that Mahmoud Abbas has been Palestinian president. And that’s far too long. Abbas has also been chairman of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation, which describes itself as the sole representative of the Palestinian people) for even longer.
A recent poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that the Palestinians have had enough. Two-thirds want Abbas out.
A majority are also dissatisfied with the decision at Fatah’s latest Convention to keep Abbas as head of Fatah for another …
